What is a digital library? In attaching the adjective "digital"to
the noun "library" the future seems to be reconciled with the past. Over the last century the United States has built a marketplace of ideas upon three institutions - libraries, publishing, and copyright law. Will "digital libraries," "electronic publishing," and "information highways" constitute the marketplace of ideas for an information society? Futurist tropes like these are reassuring because they suggest an institutional continuity between past and future, yet if technological innovation generally begins by imitating the past, it is not new tools that constitute innovation but new institutions. But futurist tropes often conceal the latent tensions between digital technology and the institutions of an industrial society, tensions that lead to important questions about the nature of the digital library. Highways carry manufactured commodities across the country, but information is an immaterial electronic signal traveling on a global digital net****. What are the consequences of this difference in the nature of printed and digital artifacts? Publishers today manufacture and distribute printed books and journals, but net**** technology enables every writer to create and personally distribute digital documents worldwide. How will the new relationships between writer and text change our sense of authorship, literature, and library collections? A library is a distinctive kind of public place, a place that defines the center of a community and polity, but cyberspace is cosmopolitan, encompassing the globe. Is it possible to create public institutions in cyberspace? The concept of an "information society" is also a futurist trope, for we do not yet know the impact of information technologies on our social life and, by extension, on the dynamics of organizations and institutions that use digital communication. Print technologies were a revolutionary innovation because they preserved knowledge by shaping it into a literature and reproduced and distributed it on a mass scale, making possible new social institutions such as science and the nation-state. The print revolution, as described by Lucien Febvre, was about something other than the history of a technique. It has to do with the effect on European culture of a new means of communicating ideas within a society that was essentially aristocratic, a society that accepted and was long to accept a culture and a tradition of learning which was restricted to certain social groups. . . . How did the printed book facilitate the rule and activity of these men? . . . Conversely, how successful was the book as an agent for the propagation of the new ideas, which we classify sometimes under the name Renaissance, sometimes under that of Humanism?(1) Today the politics of information policy is focused on controlling access to markets for knowledge in an emerging information society, but it is not yet clear what ideas, traditions of learning, or elites the new media will empower. It is not too soon to go beyond political rhetoric - to begin to explore the first research findings about the computer revolution - and ask: What kinds of social relations can exist in cyberspace, using

What is a digital library? In attaching the adjective "digital" to the noun "library" the future seems to be reconciled with the past. Over the last century the United States has built a marketplace of ideas upon three institutions - libraries, publishing, and copyright law. Will "digital libraries," "electronic publishing," and "information highways" constitute the marketplace of ideas for an information society? Futurist tropes like these are reassuring because they suggest an institutional continuity between past and future, yet if technological innovation generally begins by imitating the past, it is not new tools that constitute innovation but new institutions. But futurist tropes often conceal the latent tensions between digital technology and the institutions of an industrial society, tensions that lead to important questions about the nature of the digital library. Highways carry manufactured commodities across the country, but information is an immaterial electronic signal traveling on a global digital net****. What are the consequences of this difference in the nature of printed and digital artifacts? Publishers today manufacture and distribute printed books and journals, but net**** technology enables every writer to create and personally distribute digital documents worldwide. How will the new relationships between writer and text change our sense of authorship, literature, and library collections? A library is a distinctive kind of public place, a place that defines the center of a community and polity, but cyberspace is cosmopolitan, encompassing the globe. Is it possible to create public institutions in cyberspace? The concept of an "information society" is also a futurist trope, for we do not yet know the impact of information technologies on our social life and, by extension, on the dynamics of organizations and institutions that use digital communication. Print technologies were a revolutionary innovation because they preserved knowledge by shaping it into a literature and reproduced and distributed it on a mass scale, making possible new social institutions such as science and the nation-state. The print revolution, as described by Lucien Febvre, was about something other than the history of a technique. It has to do with the effect on European culture of a new means of communicating ideas within a society that was essentially aristocratic, a society that accepted and was long to accept a culture and a tradition of learning which was restricted to certain social groups. . . . How did the printed book facilitate the rule and activity of these men? . . . Conversely, how successful was the book as an agent for the propagation of the new ideas, which we classify sometimes under the name Renaissance, sometimes under that of Humanism?(1) Today the politics of information policy is focused on controlling access to markets for knowledge in an emerging information society, but it is not yet clear what ideas, traditions of learning, or elites the new media will empower. It is not too soon to go beyond political rhetoric - to begin to explore the first research findings about the computer revolution - and ask: What kinds of social relations can exist in cyberspace, using "information" as an organizational glue? Even more intriguing, given the emergence of a global net**** information infrastructure that has already become the foundation of global credit markets and media, can the information policies of a nation-state regulate something that far transcends its scope and powers? Libraries in America are situated on the boundary between the market and the polity, in a liminal space that provides free access to knowledge in order to fulfill the public interest in education and democratic participation. The public quality of libraries derives from a nonmarket principle of...

The library is the place in which literary and artistic materials like books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, prints, records and tapes are kept for reading, reference or lending. Libraries have been founded ages ago. The Great Library of Alexandria, Rome's Vatican Library, and the British Library are examples of the very ancient libraries in the history.

Library is very important for students in all stages because it helps them to get resources for their researches. In addition to this, people go to the library to get information about different fields. However, this essential role of the library has decreased after the shift of the resources to the internet. Many people find it easier to search in the internet because there are always on-line books and journals available 24 hours